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Piers Lane's performances of the complete Scriabin Préludes are bold and compelling, matching technical bravura with a rich vein of poetry and colour and communicating the composer's vivid and exceptional imagination. Beautifully recorded and superbly annotated by Simon Nicholls, this set is a must for all lovers of Scriabin and the piano. The Préludes of Opp 17-74 are available on CDH55451.

Reviews

'Everything about this two-disc set is ideal. Few pianists could show more sympathy and affection for such volatile romanticism, or display greater stylistic consistency. This new set of the Preludes should be in any serious record collection' (Gramophone)

'Lane certainly knows how to tease out the music's textural subtleties; his emotional commitment is undeniable, as is his grasp of the poetic/virtuosic dichotomy inherent in Scriabin's music' (BBC Music Magazine)

'Captivating, alluring performances from Lane, who captures the Chopinesque incandescence and brevity of the early Préludes with a magical sureness of touch that clarifies and illuminates even the blackest of pages' (BBC Music Magazine)

RECORDING PERFORMANCE

'Lane is the perfect guide to Scriabin’s shimmering miniature masterpieces' (The Independent)

'To find contemporary performances that convey … aspects of the music more vividly and with greater sympathy, as well as with a good deal more technical refinement, one need look no further than Piers Lane’s recent traversal' (International Record Review)

'Lane's technical brilliance and assurance captures the most elusive qualities of this music, as one dream-vision dissolves into another … [his] control and balance of their veiled sonorities is wonder-filled' (The Times)

'Piers Lane is easily the master of all this … you get the sense this music is in his blood. The preludes have been well worth waiting for' (Amazon.co.uk)

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Introduction

The musical ambitions of Alexander Scriabin (1872–1915) leaned towards the gigantic: five symphonic works, an opera project and the millennial Mysterium bear witness to this. But by natural inclination he was a miniaturist, writing throughout his career many pieces ‘short as a sparrow’s beak or a bear’s tail’, as one commentator caustically put it. These evocations, sometimes a page or less in length, can be seen as forerunners of the ‘fleeting visions’ of a Prokofiev and as descendants of the equally compact Préludes of Chopin. The first piece on this recording dates from 1889; the bleak final set of Préludes was composed after both of Debussy’s cycles, in 1914, shortly before Scriabin’s sudden death from septicaemia. Like a musical Fabergé, Scriabin is capable of creating a glittering world in a tiny space; the exquisite writing reflects the composer’s own subtle pianism, which he liked to describe as ‘crystalline’ and ‘perfumed’, but moods of disturbance, energy, even violence recur throughout the long curve of stylistic development traced by these short pieces.

The idea of a prelude as an improvisatory curtain-raiser to a performance goes back to the beginning of the history of keyboard instruments, and improvisation was still regarded as an essential skill for a concert artist in the nineteenth century. Just ten years before the Chopin Préludes were published, Carl Czerny remarked in his Systematic Introduction to Improvisation (Op 200!) that ‘it is one of the pianist’s adornments … to prepare the listeners and put them into the right frame of mind by a suitable prelude’. The importance of mood in these short improvisations led naturally to the prelude’s independent existence, most famously in Chopin, Rachmaninov and Debussy. In Safe Conduct, Boris Pasternak recounts Scriabin’s warning against ‘the harm of improvising’, but improvisation was clearly instinctive for Scriabin and an essential element in composing. Many sets of short pieces were sent off to publishers by Scriabin when cash was short: Belayev exhorted the youthful composer to systematize this spontaneous production, with the twenty-four Préludes of Op 11 as the result.

That major cycle is preceded by the pieces of Op 2 (1887–9) and Op 9 (1894). As a foil to the sombre C sharp minor Étude of Op 2 (recorded by Piers Lane on Hyperion CDH55242), Scriabin provides a Prélude of just seventeen ethereal bars—it opens with a horn-call like the one which later begins the Piano Concerto.

The Prélude for the left hand Op 9 (1894) dates from the time when, as a student at the Moscow Conservatoire, Scriabin damaged his right hand by over-practice (the works he was struggling with were Liszt’s Réminiscences de Don Juan and Balakirev’s Islamey; the rival student egging him on was none other than Joseph Lhévinne). This occurred in 1891, but the injury persisted for several years and doctors advised Scriabin (wrongly) that it would be permanent. This piece and its Nocturne companion artfully exploit the natural ability of the left hand, with the thumb and strongest fingers playing the upper part, to produce a singing line with its own accompaniment. This one-handed polyphony had its effect on the later music, where an intricate left hand makes an important contribution to the luxuriant texture.

The twenty-four Préludes Op 11 bear witness not only to Belayev’s organizational efforts but also to Scriabin’s nomadic existence of concert tours and protracted ‘cures’ from 1894 to 1896, when the majority of the Préludes were composed. Perhaps remembering the importance of Majorca in the history of Chopin’s Préludes, Scriabin appends a date and place-name to each piece. The key-scheme is Chopin’s, ascending through the circle of fifths with each major key followed by its relative minor. Unlike Chopin, Scriabin subdivides his cycle into four parts of six Préludes each: Part I (1888–96), Nos 1 to 6; Part II (1894–96), Nos 7 to 12; Part III (1895), Nos 13 to 18; and Part IV (1895–96), Nos 19 to 24.

Analysis of the Préludes of Op 11 by date and place reveals how much juggling (and transposition?) took place to produce the existing order. No 4 was composed first, at the age of sixteen, in Moscow; one year later No 6 followed in Kiev; in 1893/4 Nos 1 and 10 followed, again in Moscow. No 14 was written in Dresden, Nos 3, 19 and 24 in Heidelberg, and 17, 18 and 23 in Witznau (a Swiss resort on the Lake of Lucerne) on the tour of 1895. Later that year a group was written in Moscow: 7, 13, 15, 20, 21; Nos 2, 9 and 16 are dated November of that year, a date which may refer to the composer’s approaching split with his first love, Natalya Sekerina.

Prélude No 1 in C (Moscow, November 1893) reflects a Chopinesque influence, but the bar-by-bar waves of Chopin’s first Prélude here become longer, ‘undulating, caressing’ lines (Scriabin later suppressed this descriptive marking in favour of a simple ‘Vivace’). No 2 in A minor (Moscow, November 1895) is a melancholy, hesitant dance; No 3 in G (written the previous May on tour in Heidelberg) flutters incessantly with the sound of a summer breeze led by the right hand, whereas Chopin’s prelude in the same key gives this movement to the left. No 4 in E minor is given the marking ‘Moscow, Lefortovo, 1888’, but is in fact a reworking of a Ballade in B flat minor from the previous year. Scriabin appended a visionary poem to the Ballade:

Beautiful country; And life is different here … Here there is no place for me … There, I hear voices, I see a world of blessed souls …

The poem is prophetic of the intense inner world which Scriabin was to build for himself, and the ‘difference’ of that world is evoked by augmented harmonies—significant because of their tendency to suspend the ‘normal’ laws of tonality.

No 5 in D (Amsterdam, 1896) is an idyll, spun out on an endless thread of steadily moving left-hand quavers. Its variations on a simple recurring four-note ascent demand the most sensitive voicing and an improvisatory freedom of approach. The spell is broken by the closely imitating, rushing octaves of No 6 in B minor (Kiev, 1889—was Scriabin visiting his uncle who lived here?). The mood is one of headlong, impulsive heroism—there may be a reminiscence here of No 13 in Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze in the same key.

No 7 in A (Moscow, 1895) represents a considerable advance in technical demands, with its three strands—arching melody, restless middle part and impetuous bass figures—all to be balanced in dynamics ranging from pp to ff and propelled along at a never-resting ‘Allegro assai’ (Scriabin was supplying metronome marks for his music at this period, a practice he abandoned in later life). The speedy metronome mark of No 8 in F sharp minor (Paris, 1896) was flatly ignored by Sergei Rachmaninov in his own performances, which led to a dispute between the two young composer-pianists. (‘It’s my interpretation’; ‘But it’s my music’.) Characteristically, Rachmaninov stressed the nostalgia, Scriabin the airborne impetus of this prelude. More stylistic thumbprints can be observed in No 9 in E (Moscow, November 1895)—the active left hand which the right hand seems to be commenting on and the skipping dotted triplet figure (a Chopin rhythm) which recurs three times with tender melancholy. In December Scriabin’s teenage love, Natalya Sekerina, was to refuse decisively his proposal of marriage.

No 10 in C sharp minor (Moscow, 1894) is even more characteristic in sonority, with the horn-like middle part established near the beginning and sustained through four final punctuating chords, and the chiming sevenths which run throughout. With No 11 in B we return to Moscow and to November 1895 (the next ten Préludes were written in this year) but the regret has been replaced by a palpitating heart-in-mouth excitement, enhanced by a virtuosic left-hand part. The free-floating right-hand rubato of the middle section is typical of the pianistic style Scriabin developed from his idol Chopin. No 12 in G sharp minor (Witznau, June) was written in a resort on Lake Lucerne. It shares a tonality with Op 16 No 2, written in the same place—and with the Second Sonata Op 19 (1892–7), which was inspired by the Ligurian and Black Seas. A typically slow ‘Russian’ Andante, its brooding quality is created by suspended harmonies of the kind whose importance would steadily increase in Scriabin’s musical language.

Part III starts with another slow Prélude, No 13 in G flat (Moscow), exploiting the velvety quality of six flats and ending with a typical ‘horn call’ sonority. Its companion piece, No 14 in E flat minor (Dresden), depicts a mountain stream at Bastei dashing itself against the rocks. The time signature, then unusual, is 5/8 (Tchaikovsky, of course, had written a 5/4 movement in the Symphonie pathétique in 1893): Prokofiev might have marked it ‘precipitato’. Back to Moscow for No 15 in D flat: a cloistral hush and an airborne, suspended quality created by two-part writing in the middle register (very like that at the beginning of The Dream of Gerontius, part 2) introduce a song of deep peace. Its negative counterpart was written in November (No 16 in B flat minor). Here, endlessly repeated sequences are unbalanced by asymmetric rhythm (very rare in Scriabin): 5/8 and 4/8 alternate in a nightmarish march into the abyss.

The next two Préludes were written in Witznau in June 1895. No 17 in A flat is brief and blissful, like Chopin’s A major Prélude. The key of F minor, relatively rare during the classical period, was associated with anger or outbursts of passion: Mozart used it for Count Almaviva’s rage in Figaro. Chopin’s F minor Prélude is extraordinarily violent, and was characterized by Alfred Cortot as a ‘malediction’; Scriabin’s Prélude No 18 in the same key is a tempestuous study in left-hand octaves, taken over later by the right hand.

The first Prélude of the final section, No 19 in E flat (Heidelberg, 1895) is mature early Scriabin: the phrase shapes are characterized by a ‘swooping’ short descent followed by upward flight, with skipping dotted rhythms contributing to the sensation of weightlessness. The demanding left-hand accompaniment is rhythmically ahead of itself, each figure starting on the final semiquaver of the beat—a device perhaps derived from Schumann. No 20 in C minor (Moscow, 1895) has a meteoric career not unlike Scriabin’s own, blazing with the most elevated of ideals and abruptly snuffed out after brief protest. Interestingly, the composer’s son-in-law Sofronitsky preferred to play the manuscript version, where this tragedy is softened by a major-mode ending. The arrangement of the cycle seems to go against this: the tranquillity of No 21 in B flat (Moscow, 1895) is repeatedly interrupted by silences and No 22 in G minor (Paris, 1896) has an insistently falling, regretful cadence. The mood lightens with No 23 in F, written the previous year in the idyllic surroundings of Witznau. lts rustling broken-chord figurations are a clear homage to Chopin’s own F major Prélude—a backward glance before the heaven-storming No 24 in D minor (Heidelberg, 1895) which wisely avoids meeting Chopin on his own ground, concentrating instead on the pulsating chordal writing which had concluded the Études of Op 8.

Twenty-three Préludes in the next four opuses bear witness to a project to write a set of forty-eight: the key scheme is followed again in Op 13 and Op 15 but begins to break down in the next set. To follow the circle of fifths as far as possible one would have to play Op 16 Nos 1, 2, 5, 4, Op 17 Nos 3, 4 (A flat is missing), 5, 2 (C minor is missing), 6, 7 (F is missing), 1. The order of composition is another matter, and overlaps greatly with the times and places of Op 11: in Moscow in 1894 Scriabin composed Op 16 Nos 1 and 3; in the same city the following year he wrote all of Op 13, Op 15 Nos 1–3, Op 16 No 5 and Op 17 Nos 4 and 6. Op 17 No 7 comes from the same year but from a visit in April to St Petersburg, where Op 16 No 4 was also composed. Other Préludes result from the trips abroad: Op 16 No 2 was written in Witznau in June 1895, and the romantic surroundings of Heidelberg produced Op 15 No 5 and Op 17 No 5 in the same year. The Paris trip of 1896 was the origin of Op 15 No 4 and Op 17 Nos 1–3.

Scriabin clearly sets out to give contrasting characters to those in the Préludes of Op 11: Op 13 No 1 is a solemn chorale, No 2 an airborne moto perpetuo, No 3 reflective and still, with a delightful tertiary harmonic shift, No 4 agitated (here each hand gets a chance to provide the semiquaver movement), No 5 a gentle study in sixths rather like the A major Étude, Op 8 No 6 (also on the recording by Piers Lane of the complete Études mentioned above), and No 6, a fine build-up in octaves with some kinship to Op 8 No 9 in C sharp minor, rounds off the set—both pieces attain grand climaxes but have quiet ‘dissolving’ endings, a characteristic feature of the later sonatas.

Op 15 is on a smaller scale: No 1 is an inconsequential improvisation on an unpretentious turn figure, No 2 another moto perpetuo, originally marked ‘Agitato’—a marking later replaced by a more non-commital ‘Vivo’. There are two E major Préludes in Op 15: No 3 is an expansive essay in arpeggiated chords while No 4 is a peaceful miniature. The meandering rubato of No 5 closes this rather introverted set.

With Op 16 we reach a more elevated plane: this is the Scriabin idolized by the young Pasternak. Characteristically, Op 16 No 1 sustains one dominant harmony for much of its length, supporting an aspiring, soaring melodic line. No 2 is built on obsessively repeated polyrhythmic figures. lts tonality has already been remarked on in connection with Op 11 No 12. No 3 is serene in its recurring pattern of sixths, around which a filigree solo line is spun. The twelve bars of No 4 stand all under one slur: Scriabin is obsessive in his construction of four-bar phrases, but this despairing page is constructed of four phrases each three bars long, which have to sing in one breath. No 5 is an exquisite, elegant dance miniature.